The reform to the Judicial Branch is shaping up to be the last of the major amendments that he promoted and that will transcend López Obrador’s six-year term and will be ready in a maximum of fifteen days, in accordance with the goal that Morena has set. If this is the case, it would be the last trophy that the president will have to show off, even at the Grito de Independencia ceremony, on the night of September 15, which will be the culmination of his administration.
Morena and its allies, with a qualified majority of 364 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and with 85 seats, are preparing to make many constitutional amendments, but the one related to the Judiciary is of a magnitude greater than any structural change that has occurred during the PRI and PAN six-year terms, political analysts believe.
The judicial reform will be accompanied by another constitutional amendment: to maintain militarized public security tasks, by giving operational control of the National Guard to the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena), the second priority of the first month of this new Legislature. And there are also modifications regarding the rights of indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities; the triad will be processed quickly.
Even so, the possibility of 17 other reform initiatives presented by the president on February 5th being approved remains strong, although not all of them have been approved yet. And according to the leader of Morena in the Chamber of Deputies, Ricardo Monreal, although they will be approved, they are not on the agenda for now.
Agustín Basave Benítez, a political scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Monterrey (UDEM), argues that the depth of the reforms to come indicates that difficult times are coming, a “deplorable situation that outlines something very serious: a judicial reform that is nonsense, whose objective is to carry out the president’s revenge for resolutions that he did not like.”
That, with the addition of an aligned Congress, “with which we are returning to the times of the old hegemonic PRI of the last century, in terms of numbers: an overwhelming majority that will give a Congress in its own way… but of López Obrador, not of President Claudia Sheinbaum.”
However, for Marcela Bravo Ahuja, professor and researcher at UNAM, although the judicial reform will mark the end of a six-year term marked by presidential control over the legislative agenda, it cannot be considered that there is or will be a scenario of the country returning to the past.
“There was a lot of criticism of divided governments, the impossibility of building majorities and agreements, and now there is going to be criticism of the fact that we have unified governments? No, I believe that unified or divided governments are efficient or not according to the governing capacity of the political subjects,” says the political scientist.
What will the new Congress be like?
The Chamber of Deputies and the Senate begin work in the 66th Legislature with that ideal world, the “Plan C” outlined by President López Obrador a year and a half ago, in which Morena and its allies have a qualified majority in Congress, although in the Senate they are one step away from achieving it.
In this scenario, the opposition was reduced and will be able to hold the debate, but will not win any vote without the will of Morena.
The forces that formed the Fuerza y Corazón por México Coalition will have a minority presence in both chambers: the National Action Party (PAN), with 71 deputies and 22 senators; the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with 35 deputies and 16 senators; and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), unregistered and with one female deputy.
(Photo: Presidency)
The Citizen Movement, with five senators and 27 deputies, will also lack legislative power.
With these numbers, the Senate’s containment bloc that was able to operate for almost the entire six-year term, in the 64th and 65th Legislatures, made up of legislators from all parties opposed to the Fourth Transformation to stop amendments to the Constitution, was dead.
Now, together the three opposition parties that united in the elections of June 2, plus MC that fought alone in that contest, were reduced to 33.59% of the Senate of the Republic.
And with the recent defection of two PRD legislators, Sabino Herrera and Araceli Ocampo, who won their seats with a campaign that denounced Morena as a risk to the country but migrated to its ranks as soon as they won, there is a possibility that the opposition presence will be reduced even further.
At any moment, the opposition, which has only one vote as the key to avoiding a vote on constitutional reform, could lose it: it would be enough for a senator who is not from Morena, the Labor Party (PT) and the Green Party (PVEM) to vote with that bloc, or to be absent, for it to obtain the qualified majority necessary for constitutional reforms.
